UK Foreign Secretary denies withholding rendition information

[JURIST] British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw [official website] denied Friday that he withheld any information from Parliament concerning Britain's involvement in secret CIA rendition flights [JURIST news archive] and also said that there had not been any flights through Britain since the September 11 attacks. Straw's statement to legislators came in response to a leaked memo [PDF text; JURIST report] Thursday suggesting that there had been more requests for rendition flights from the US than the four 1998 requests that British legislators were already aware of. The memo, dated in December 2005 and reported in Thursday's edition of the New Statesman magazine, was originally passed from Straw's Foreign and Commonwealth Office [official website] to the Prime Minister's office [official website] and examined the legality of rendition and extraordinary rendition flights, as well as strategies to address allegations from human rights groups that the CIA operated secret rendition flights across Europe. AP has more. BBC News has local coverage.

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